Yesterday the Histadrut trade union federation in Israel formally announced a labour dispute in Israel's public sector. At the end of a 15-day "cooling off" period, some 700,000 workers will be legally entitled to take strike action. Our correspondent in Israel analyses the situation and interviews Binyamin Gonen, a longstanding member of the Political Committee of the Communist Party of Israel and is political front DFPE-Hadash. Gonen was for many years also a member of the leadership of the party's faction in the Histadrut.

Last week twenty seven Israeli pilots signed a public declaration in which they announced their refusal to participate in missions of "targeted killings" and assassinations in the West Bank and Gaza strip. The government and the ruling class are in panic. The letter of the pilots has undermined the legitimacy of the war crimes committed by the Zionists in the Occupied Territories.

Once again Sharon and Co have provoked the working class in Israel with further dismissals of workers in the public sector in an open violation of the agreement that was reached last May. On Monday, some 50,000 civil servants launched an open-ended work-to-rule. Additionally, hospital workers are preparing to join the strike after Yom Kippur.

The recent suicide bombing in Haifa which killed 19 people and wounded
45 has been used by the Sharon government as an excuse to hit Syria with an air
strike. In spite of the fact that Syria closed Hamas and Jihad bases in an
attempt to appease US imperialism, the Israeli government has carried out this provocative
attack. Obviously Sharon has his own agenda. Yossi Schwartz in Israel analyses
what this new development implies and offers a socialist perspective and
solution to the conflict.

Recent suicide bomb attacks in Israel have been used by Sharon as an excuse to attack Syria. Sharon is clearly distracting attention away from his own internal problems. But there is clearly a section of the Israeli ruling class, backed by at least a part of the US bourgeois, who would like to wage war on Syria. Leon Cohen of the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. in Israel/Palestine looks at the background to this situation and offers a socialist way out of the impasse.

This month marked the 30th anniversary of the 1973 Middle East war. Thirty years after that war ended some of the Agranat Committee's findings have been published in Israel that shed a new light on those events. They reveal the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres between the Soviet Union and the USA and also how the then government of Israel hid many important facts from its own people about what was really going on.